00:00What if I told you a meteorite four times the size of Mount Everest
00:03once hit Earth and boiled the oceans?
00:05Around 3.26 billion years ago,
00:08a massive space rock named S2 crashed into our planet,
00:12making the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs look tiny in comparison.
00:16The impact was so colossal,
00:18it caused the ocean to bubble like a boiling pot of water
00:21and unleashed the largest tsunami ever recorded.
00:24Can you imagine?
00:26Scientists traveled to South Africa's Barberton Greenstone Belt,
00:29where they studied the crater from this mega-impact.
00:32The heat, the dust, the destruction, it was total chaos.
00:37But here's the twist.
00:38Scientists believe that this massive impact may have actually helped life thrive.
00:43The tsunami stirred up iron from the ocean's depths,
00:46while phosphorus from the meteorite fed life-boosting single-celled organisms,
00:50sparking a biological explosion.
00:53So while this meteorite was devastating,
00:55it might have helped life on Earth evolve.
00:58But if something like this happened today,
01:00we'd be in big trouble.
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